Chris Hedges's Blog, page 278

Bernie Sanders Releases 10 Years of Long-Awaited Tax Returns

WASHINGTON — Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders on Monday released 10 years of his long-anticipated tax returns as he campaigns for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

The returns provide a more detailed look at Sanders’ finances than when he ran for president in 2016. The release also confirms that Sanders’ income crossed the $1 million threshold in 2016 and 2017, though he reported less earnings in his most recent return.

His 2018 return reveals that he and his wife, Jane, earned more than $550,000, including $133,000 in income from his Senate salary and $391,000 in sales of his book, “Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In.” Sanders’ campaign said in a news release that he paid 26% effective tax rate in 2018.

During his first presidential bid, Sanders released just one year of his tax returns despite primary rival Hillary Clinton pushing him to follow her lead and release multiple years of tax information. He declined to do so, disclosing only his tax return for 2014. Tax transparency has been in the spotlight as Donald Trump bucks decades of presidential tradition by declining to show voters his tax filings and House Democrats seek to force him to turn them over.

During a Fox News Channel town hall on Monday, Sanders said that he’d increased his income by publishing a book — he’s written two with campaign themes — and that he wouldn’t apologize for that. He also challenged Trump to release his tax returns.

“I guess the president watches your network a little bit, right?” Sanders said to the moderators. “Hey, President Trump. My wife and I just released 10 years. Please do the same.”

The filings show that Sanders, who throughout his career has called for an economy and government that works for everyone and not just the 1 percent, is among the top 1 percent of earners in the U.S. According to the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute. families in the U.S. earning $421,926 or more a year are part of this group.

In a statement accompanying the release, Sanders said that the returns show that his family has been “fortunate,” something he is grateful for after growing up in a family that lived paycheck to paycheck.

“I consider paying more in taxes as my income rose to be both an obligation and an investment in our country. I will continue to fight to make our tax system more progressive so that our country has the resources to guarantee the American Dream to all people,” Sanders added.

Sanders, 77, has also listed Social Security payments for each year of the decade of tax returns he made available Monday. By 2018, his wife, 69, was also taking Social Security, providing the couple with nearly $52,000 for the year.

Sanders’ status as a millionaire, which he acknowledged last week, was cemented in his 2017 statement. That year, Sanders disclosed $1.31 million income, combined from his Senate salary and $961,000 in book royalties and sales. His higher income in two of the three most recent years could potentially prompt questions from voters about his frequent criticisms of the influence that millionaires and billionaires have over the political process.

Sanders and his wife disclosed $36,300 in charitable contributions in 2017, but their return does not detail each individual contribution. That same year, the couple announced publicly that they had donated $25,000 as a grant to launch the Sanders Institute, a nonprofit educational organization aligned with the senator’s political and ideological interests.

Jane Sanders was a co-founder of the nonprofit, along with her son, David Driscoll, who became the institute’s executive director. Sanders and his wife put the institute on hiatus last month amid criticism that the nonprofit blurred lines between family, fundraising and campaigning. Jane Sanders said the nonprofit would cease operations beginning in May “so there could not even be an appearance of impropriety.”

A number of Sanders’ rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination — including Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Kamala Harris of California and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota — have released tax records to varying degrees. Gillibrand was the first candidate to release her 2018 tax returns, and her campaign released a video in which she called on other candidates to join her.

Warren, who has also already released her 2018 tax returns, made public 10 years of tax information last year. Harris released 15 years of tax returns over the weekend. Klobuchar released her 2018 tax return on Monday and said in a campaign video that she hoped Trump, who spent the day campaigning in Minnesota, would release his own taxes on his trip to the state. (He didn’t.)

Why Won’t the Mainstream Media Acknowledge Our Forever Wars?

Taking a country to war is the most consequential step political leaders can take. So it would follow that a free press tasked with holding political leaders accountable for such a fateful decision would exercise the utmost scrutiny when it comes to reporting on the costs—both financial and human.

This  necessarily rigorous journalistic oversight should never be satisfied with repeating vague claims of progress or accepting easily contradicted evidence about having achieved peace. Literal human lives, both civilian and military, hang in the balance, and so as a war drags on, it becomes increasingly important for a free press to avoid complacency and ruthlessly interrogate the facts on the ground.

Tragically, coverage of US military combat in Iraq offers an untold number of examples where the corporate press spectacularly failed to live up to this critical responsibility. Whether it was the unabashed cheerleading that colored much of the reporting during the first Gulf War (Extra!, 4/91) or the credulous parroting of false WMD claims in the lead-up to the 2003 re-invasion—with the New York Times earning special condemnation (FAIR.org, 7/21/16)—the US media has compiled a dreadful record when it comes to Iraq.

And, true to form, in the past two weeks we’ve see another, less monumental but still insidious, case of inaccurate Iraq war coverage. Coincidentally, this latest mistake comes courtesy of corporate media’s “factchecking” structure.

It all stems from a comment by Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke, who has begun inserting a critique of our country’s endless war posture into his stump speeches. At his campaign launch in February, and in several public appearances since, he has commented along these lines (from a March 30 speech):

Do we really want to fight wars forever? Twenty-seven years in Iraq, 18 years, almost, in Afghanistan and counting, with no definition or strategy or end in sight. Trillions of dollars we are spending to fight and to rebuild countries that we’ve invaded.

While the claim of 18 years of military combat in Afghanistan is incontrovertible, some in the press pounced on O’Rourke’s description of an Iraq war that is “27 years and counting.” The Associated Press (4/2/19) drew first blood. In a long factcheck of false statements by Trump, writers Hope Yen, Calvin Woodward and Eric Tucker incongruously wedged in a critique of O’Rourke’s 27 years claim, flatly declaring that he had “misstated the length of the US involvement in the Iraq War.”

This kind of forced false equivalence in factchecking is not new. FAIR (12/7/19) has previously demonstrated how traditional news orgs, already awash in a sea of Trump’s dishonesty, often contort themselves to shoehorn supposedly false comments by left-of-center politicians into the voluminous coverage of the president’s many lies and distortions.

Not to be outdone, the Washington Post (4/9/19) also took O’Rourke to task for his “27 years and counting” claim. Writing in his Fact-Checker column, Glenn Kessler said “O’Rourke’s math for the Iraq War left us flummoxed.” Parsing what he asserts were the begin and end states of US military combat in Iraq, Kessler rests his main objection on the 12-year interregnum between the end of coalition ground hostilities in the first Gulf War in late February 1991 and the second US ground invasion in March 2003. Giving O’Rourke “Three Pinocchios,” Kessler concluded:

There are three, or maybe four, points at which the United States can be labeled as fighting in Iraq in the past three decades. But there has not been a continuous war.

This is, simply put, not true. But it offers a clear tell to how corporate media have grown inured to nearly two generations of US military combat in Iraq, and increasingly normalized our nation’s violent power projection around the world.

In fact, the end of ground hostilities in 1991’s Operation Desert Storm merely marked a transition to a new kind war in Iraq: a US/UK air combat occupation known in military parlance as operations Northern and Southern Watch. This “no-fly zone” covered more than half of Iraq’s total airspace, and lasted from the end of the 1991 Gulf War right up until the March 2003 invasion. Nevertheless, Kessler quickly glosses over this period in two paragraphs, briefly mentioning 1998’s Desert Fox cruise missile attack on Iraq, but then archly concludes: “But no troops entered Iraq in this period.”

This is a chilling and astoundingly outdated calculus by Kessler. (The AP avoided this particular mistake by failing to mention the 12-year no-fly zone altogether—an even more stunningly negligent oversight.) War is not simply defined by the presence of infantry soldiers maneuvering over foreign terrain. Taking control of another country’s airspace with armed aircraft is no less an act of war than implementing a naval blockade of a country’s ports.

But don’t just take my word for it. Here’s the NATO Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Phillip Breedlove saying the exact same thing back in 2013 , when US politicians like Sen. John McCain began calling for a no-fly zone over parts of Syria in the early stages of that country’s horrible civil war: “It is quite frankly an act of war and it is not a trivial matter,” he told Stars &  Stripes (5/31/13).

And even though the Iraq no-fly zones were ostensibly a continuation of UN Resolution 688, that doesn’t make them any less of a form of combat operations. UN-sanctioned war is still war.

Indeed, to read this public report from the UK National Archives is to get much better grasp of the deadly consequences of the US/UK no-fly-zone operations. From just 1991 to 1993, the report noted at least five separate air combat incidents:

The first two years involved relatively routine patrolling of the no-fly zone, although two Iraqi fighters were shot down and elements of Iraq’s ground based air defen2e system posing a threat were attacked in three incidents in December 1992 and January 1993.

During the last of these series of US/UK attacks—a strike against Iraqi intelligence headquarters in retaliation for an alleged assassination plot to kill President George H.W. Bush—nine civilians were reportedly killed and 12 more were wounded by an errant coalition missile. In September 1996, the allied coalition also launched two separate cruise missile attacks into Iraq, in response to an Iraqi army incursion against Kurds in northern Iraq.

Then, in December 1998, the US and Britain launched Operation Desert Fox, after Iraq refused to comply with UNSCOM inspections at a few sensitive sites, although, contrary to many subsequent, erroneous press reports, Iraq did not expel the inspectors from the country (FAIR.org, 3/6/00).

Though Kessler does mention Desert Fox as “four-day bombing campaign” in his column, he left out all the details and key context of the scale of what was involved. According to the UK archives, in Desert Fox:

US and UK forces used over 400 cruise missiles (more than in the 1991 Gulf Conflict) and 218 tactical bomber sorties to attack 100 targets, including:

sites identified as being involved in Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs;
command and control facilities through which Saddam controlled military and internal security forces;
the Iraqi Republican Guard;
the Iraqi air defense system;
airfields, including those associated with helicopter forces used for internal repression.

While no specific figures exist for Iraqi military personnel killed by Desert Fox, various contemporaneous reports put the civilian casualty total at several hundred, with around 60 to 70 killed. In the wake of this carnage, Iraq summarily refused to accept the continued no-fly zone patrols, and for the next five years resisted this air occupation with repeated combat responses, as the UK report points out:

Coalition aircraft were fired at by Iraqi surface-to-air missiles and anti-aircraft artillery or targeted by fire control radars. In responding to this threat, coalition aircraft targeted a variety of different elements of Iraq’s Integrated Air Defense System, such as radar sites and associated communications and control networks, surface-to-air missile batteries and anti-aircraft artillery positions. RAF Jaguars flying reconnaissance operations in the northern no-fly zone did not carry or drop air-to-ground ordnance, but RAF Tornado aircraft did so in the southern no-fly zone on numerous occasions.

During the more than 12 years of air patrols over Iraq, the US alone averaged more than 34,000 annual military sorties, according to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. And an October 2002 Congressional Research Service report calculated that the total costs of these two massive, ongoing no-fly zone operations came to more than $10 billion.

All of these attacks and untold number of deaths does not rise to the definition of war to the Post’s Kessler or to the AP. This is both historical and journalistic malpractice—and the furthest thing from accurate, contextual factchecking.

One wonders if these two news organization would so cavalierly dismiss, if not wholly disappear, Russian or Chinese fighter jets patrolling the eastern half of the United States and occasionally shooting down our military aircraft or bombing our air defense systems. Of course, the question answers itself.

Kessler also subtracts the nearly three years, from 2012 to late 2014, when regular US ground combat units were absent from the country. Once again, though, having regular troops on the ground is not the definition of being engaged in combat. In fact, one US soldier was still killed by hostile fire during this period, according to iCasualties.org. Furthermore, a Post report (4/17/16) noted that US special operations advisors had remained in northern Iraq from the claimed end of combat hostilities in 2011 right up through the ISIS takeover of Mosul in 2014.

But what’s even more inexplicable is that Kessler brushes aside an admission by the US military itself that our country has been in continuous combat operations since the first Gulf War. In his column, Kessler included this defense of the 27 years claim by an O’Rourke campaign aide:

Evans said O’Rourke’s remarks were inspired by Gen. Stephen W. Wilson, the Air Force’s vice chief of staff, who came before the House Armed Services Committee on October 3, 2017, and stated: “The 26 years of continuous combat has limited our ability to prepare . . . against advanced future threats. Scenarios with the lowest margin of error and the highest risk to national security. This nonstop combat, paired with the budget instability and lower than planned top lines, has been the United States Air Force, the smallest, oldest equipment and least ready in our history.”

If anything, one could argue O’Rourke is slightly too low, and that 28 years and counting would be more accurate. But Kessler effectively dismisses this testimony, in a classic case of “Who are you going to believe: Me or your lying eyes?” and instead sides with a handful of former Bush and Obama White House officials who say otherwise. His verdict for O’Rourke: “Three Pinocchios,” his column’s second-highest rating for rhetorical dishonesty.

For context, here are some other, recent “Three Pinocchio” fact-checks from the Washington Post, for comparison:

Trump’s claim that his daughter Ivanka has created “millions of jobs” (2/27/19)
GOP Rep. Liz Cheney’s claim that the Green New Deal would “eliminate air travel” (2/14/19)
Vice President Pence’s claim that the Trump administration “has stood strong for a free and independent press and defended the freedom of the press on the world stage” (11/20/18)

The absurdity on offer here by the Post (and the AP) is obvious, but it’s also symbolic of corporate media’s broader bias in war coverage toward US military adventurism, and the institutional timidity that it creates. In a way, O’Rourke’s scathing critique of the excessively violent nature of US foreign policy for the past three decades also contains an implied condemnation of the media that have enabled this endless war posture. After all, you’ll never succeed in holding politicians accountable for flawed wars if you can’t recognize what war looks like in the first place.

Stephen Miller and the White Nationalist Takeover of the White House

What follows is a conversation between journalist Lacqueline Luqman, Truthdig contributor Jeff Cohen and Marc Stiner of the Real News Network. Read a transcript of their conversation below or watch the video at the bottom of the post.

MARC STEINER: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Marc Steiner. Great to have you all with us. This is the third part of our conversation today about what’s happening in this week’s news. We are going to look at Stephen Miller in the Trump administration and the power of the white nationalist Right in that administration. What’s happening is emblematic of what’s happening inside the Department of Homeland Security. We are joined here once again by Jeff Cohen, who is founder of RootsAction.org and the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, and author of Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in the Corporate Media, and Jacqueline Luqman, who is Editor-in-chief of Luqman Nation and a regular contributor here at The Real News. So let’s jump right into this. This is pretty stunning that Stephen Miller has got all this power in the White House, one of Steve Bannon’s proteges and Jeff Session’s righthand for a long time, and he’s a survivor. Bannon was thrown out. Maybe he didn’t know how to dress right. I’m not sure, but he was thrown out and switched to Stephen Miller. He’s there but he’s changing the dynamic of this administration. He seems to be moving them further to the right, pushing for these changes first in the D.H.S., Homeland Security. So tell me what this portends for the two of you. Jeff, let me start with you again.

JEFF COHEN: Well for saying the obvious truth, Miller is a white nationalist. He’s an immigrant basher. One of the weirdest schemes exposed by The Washington Post with really good sourcing, is that they had a scheme. They were going to take detainees at the Mexico border and transport them to places like San Francisco and put them in sanctuary cities. They take people they’ve got under arrest in custody and bus them to these cities that are sanctuary cities. It’s utterly outrageous. If the Democrats weren’t so obsessed with Russiagate, they might talk about this kind of craziness is impeachable. To me, the most interesting thing about Stephen Miller is his wonderful uncle, Dr. David Glosser. I’ve read his columns. I’ve seen him on Democracy Now! He points out that if it wasn’t for restrictive immigration, dozens of Stephen Miller’s ancestors would not have been killed by the Holocaust that in 1924, was this restrictive immigration law and then there were a bunch of anti-Semites in the State Department. Even with the rise of fascism and the rise of Hitler, they wouldn’t let these people in, and they died. So there’s a lot of sympathy for refugees in the Jewish community. Stephen Miller is an exception.

MARC STEINER: That’s the truth. I’m sorry he’s part of the Jewish community, but he is. But anyway, we’ll play this short clip here of his comments in a press conference about Emma Lazarus and what it really meant.

REPORTER [CLIP]: The Statue of Liberty says “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Doesn’t say anyting about speaking English or being able to be a computer programmer. Aren’t you trying to change what it means t0 be an immigrant coming into this county if you’re telling them you have to speak Enlgish? Can’t people learn how to speak English when they get here?

STEPHEN MILLER [CLIP]: Well, first of all, right now it’s a requirement that to be naturalized you have to speak English. So the notion that speaking English wouldn’t be a part of immigration systems would be actually very ahistorical. Secondly, I don’t want to get off into a whole thing about history here, but the Statue of Liberty is a symbol of liberty enlightening the world. It’s a symbol of American liberty lighting the world. The poem that you’re referring to that was added later was not actually part of the original Statue of Liberty. But more fundamentally, the history-

MARC STEINER: Looking at Steve Miller, he first had his history wrong about Emma Lazarus. She wrote the poem to raise money for the Statue of Liberty. It wasn’t just plucked from there later, but this becomes a real issue. This whole thing of changing people in the D.H.S., moving in people who were further to the right and tougher. As Donald Trump has said, we want tougher people in there and what Jeff was talking about earlier, dumping people in sanctuary cities. This is– will the Democrats stand up and see this as a war for the future of our country?

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: Have they yet?

MARC STEINER: Some of them have. Some of them have.

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: Too few. I think, too few. Listen, all of these policies that are coming from Miller and through Trump. Trump saying, I think yesterday I read in Politico that Trump said, “I’m the architect of these policies, no one else.” We all know that it’s really Stephen Miller, white nationalist Stephen Miller. There, I said it too. These policies come out of this white nationalist terror of the browning of America that’s just trying to stop this tide of the population, the white population of this country, becoming a minority statistically, numerically and more brown people coming in and taking over and usurping. I’m intentionally using that word because that’s how they see it. They’re standing in their power. So these policies are really meant to be exactly how they look: draconian, inhumane, evil, exclusionary, and they know that these policies will probably be challenged by a federal judge. This binary choice foolishness is just family separation that was halted by a judge…

MARC STEINER: Even Kirstjen Nielsen didn’t like it in the end and pushed back, which is one of the reasons she was pushed out.

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: Exactly, but this new binary choice business is just family separation, but supposedly giving the asylum seeker a choice to be either deported or detained with your family, or you can choose to have your family separated in separate detentions. It’s all exactly what it looks like. It is the demonization of brown immigrant people and it is white nationalism and white supremacy in action. The Democrats are too slow to respond to this the way they should.

MARC STEINER: Let me pick up on that point as we close out here. How dangerous do the two of you think of the situation we are facing with this very white nationalist crowd, managing and running the Executive Branch of the United States, and what that portends? I think people sometimes don’t talk about this aspect of it enough. What do you think we’re really facing here and what are our challenges, Jeff?

JEFF COHEN: I think this is a more dangerous time than during Nixon and Watergate. I have wanted the Democrats to talk about some of the racism and the violence, and the affronts to the Constitution from the Trump administration in the context of impeachment. Not Mueller, not Russiagate, but these real attacks on big sectors of our population. The Muslim ban, it should have been talked about in the context of impeachment. This administration is unfit. Trump is unfit. He’s not against immigrants. He’s married two of them. As Jacqueline said, he’s against Latino immigration. He’s against Black immigrants from what he calls “shithole countries,” or “shithouse countries…”

MARC STEINER: Right, “shithole countries.”

JEFF COHEN: He thinks we should have more immigrants from Denmark. We are in a real dangerous point in U.S. history and I think Progressives, sometimes maybe we have to lower our voices. I know I work on it myself because we are at a real crossroads in terms of whether we are going to move in a progressive direction, or whether we’re going to head to a more fascistic direction. Things are very dangerous today.

MARC STEINER: I agree with that assessment, Jeff. And very quickly, Jeff, just to pick from that point from your perspective, sometimes people think there’s a danger zone. Progressives can get very narrow in their thinking about this, not thinking of a broader group of people who can say “no” to what we’re facing.

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: Yeah. This is, I think, a more dangerous time for this country in that this particular administration is overt, and very overt in its aims and goals. But I think I need to be clear that white supremacy has been a problem in the United States government in the way some policies have been enacted towards certain groups of people here, for a very long time.

MARC STEINER: Really? [laughter]

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: Surprise, surprise. White supremacy isn’t new in the United States government, but I agree that as far as where we want to be or go as a nation is concerned, we either turn it around now and do something about this particular administration, or I don’t think there is going to be an ability to come back. We’re going to cross the Rubicon, here. I think we’re right at the banks and we have to do something more than just empty rhetoric.

MARC STEINER: We can’t allow ourselves to become another 1877 redux of the end of Reconstruction. I want to thank you both for being here. Jacqueline Luqman and Jeff Cohen, thank you both so much. It’s been a great conversation. I appreciate your time. And I’m Marc Steiner here for The Real News Network. Thank you for your time and joining us. Take care.

Mitch McConnell Is Single-Handedly Destroying the Senate

Congress has recessed for two weeks without passing a desperately-needed disaster relief bill. Why not? Because Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell didn’t want to anger Donald Trump by adding money for Puerto Rico that Democrats have sought but Trump doesn’t want.

America used to have a Senate. But under McConnell, what was once known as the worlds greatest deliberative body has become a partisan lap dog.

Recently McConnell used his Republican majority to cut the time for debating Trump’s court appointees from 30 hours to two – thereby enabling Republicans to ram through even more Trump judges.

In truth, McConnell doesn’t give a fig about the Senate, or about democracy. He cares only about partisan wins.

On the eve of the 2010 midterm elections he famously declared that his top priority was for Barack Obama “to be a one-term president.”

Between 2009 and 2013, McConnell’s Senate Republicans blocked 79 Obama nominees. In the entire history of the United States until that point, only 68 presidential nominees had been blocked.

This unprecedented use of the filibuster finally led Senate Democrats in 2013 to change the rules on some presidential nominees (but not the Supreme Court) to require simple majorities.

In response, McConnell fumed that “breaking the rules to change the rules is un-American.“ If so, McConnell is about as un-American as they come. Once back in control of the Senate he buried Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court by refusing even to hold hearings.

Then, in 2017, McConnell and his Republicans changed the rules again, ending the use of the filibuster even for Supreme Court nominees and clearing the way for Senate confirmation of Trump’s Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.

Step by step, McConnell has sacrificed the Senate as an institution to partisan political victories.

There is a vast difference between winning at politics by playing according to the norms of our democracy, and winning by subverting those norms.

To Abraham Lincoln, democracy was a covenant linking past and future. Political institutions, in his view, were “the legacy bequeathed to us.”

On the eve of the Senate’s final vote on repealing the Affordable Care Act in July 2017, the late John McCain returned to Washington from his home in Arizona, where he was being treated for brain cancer, to cast the deciding vote against repeal.

Knowing he would be criticized by other Republicans, McCain noted that over his career he had known senators who seriously disagreed with each other but nonetheless understood “they had an obligation to work collaboratively to ensure the Senate discharged its constitutional responsibilities effectively.”

In words that have even greater relevance today, McCain added that “it is our responsibility to preserve that, even when it requires us to do something less satisfying than ‘winning’.”

In politics, success should never be measured solely by partisan victories. It must also be judged by the institutional legacy passed onward. The purpose of political leadership is not merely to win. It is to serve.

In any social or political system it’s always possible to extract benefits by being among the first to break widely accepted norms. In a small town where people don’t lock their doors or windows, the first thief can effortlessly get into anyone’s house. But once broken, the system is never the same. Everyone has to buy locks. Trust deteriorates.

Those, like Mitch McConnell, who break institutional norms for selfish or partisan gains are bequeathing future generations a weakened democracy.

The difference between winning at politics by playing according to the norms and rules of our democracy, and winning by subverting them, could not be greater. Political victories that undermine the integrity of our system are net losses for society.

Great athletes play by the rules because the rules make the game. Unprincipled athletes cheat or change the rules in order to win. Their victories ultimately destroy the game.

In terms of shaping the federal courts, McConnell has played “the long game”, which, incidentally, is the title of his 2016 memoir. Decades from now, McConnell will still be shaping the nation through judges he rammed through the Senate.

But McConnell’s long game is destroying the Senate.

He is longest-serving leader of Senate Republicans in history but Mitch McConnell is no leader. He is the epitome of unprincipled power. History will not treat him kindly.

Fox News’ Town Hall With Bernie Sanders Backfires Spectacularly

During a town hall hosted by Fox News Monday night, Sen. Bernie Sanders countered one of the most common right-wing talking points against Medicare for All and made the case for transitioning to a single-payer system—sparking applause from the Bethlehem, Pennsylvania audience.

“Millions of people, every single year, lose their health insurance. You know why? They get fired. Or They quit. And they go to another employer,” said the Vermont senator and 2020 presidential contender after Fox moderator Bret Baier suggested 180 million Americans with employer-provided insurance would lose coverage under Medicare for All.

“Every year, millions of workers wake up in the morning and their employer has changed the insurance that they have,” Sanders added. “So this is not new… Now what we’re talking about actually is stability. That when you have a Medicare for All [program] it is there now and it will be there in the future.”

Bernie counters talk-point about losing employer-based insurance. Points out that Medicare For All would provide everyone with long-term health care stability. #Bernie #BernieFoxTownHall #berniesanderstownhall pic.twitter.com/rdzZ7oB7Hh

— Digital Left (@DigitalLeft) April 16, 2019

When Baier polled the town hall audience to gauge support for switching to a Medicare for All system, most hands shot up and many cheered.

As activist Jordan Uhl put it, Baier’s question “backfired spectacularly.” According to recent polling, a majority of Republican voters support Medicare for All.

That backfired… #BernieTownHall pic.twitter.com/NCKNDIQauZ

— DSA for Medicare for All (@dsam4a) April 15, 2019

In addition to highlighting specific planks of his policy platform—from Medicare for All to tuition-free public college to a living wage—Sanders also used his Fox News town hall to explain his broader vision of a more egalitarian U.S. society, in which wealth and political power are not concentrated at the very top:

Democratic socialism, to me, is creating a government and an economy and a society which works for all, rather than just the top one percent. It means ending the absurd inequalities that exist today. And I want to lay this out, because you’re not going to hear this much on Fox. And you’re not going to hear this much in the media in general. And the American people have got to conclude whether we think it is appropriate, and what America is about… to have three families owning more wealth than the bottom half of American society—160 million people. Whether it’s appropriate for the top one percent to own more wealth than the bottom 92 percent.

Senator Bernard Sanders of Vermont on Fox News: “Democratic socialism to me is creating a governor and an economy that works for all rather than just the top 1%.. we want to create a political system based on one person one vote not billionaires buying elections” #BernieTownHall pic.twitter.com/NzBjhisfux

— People for Bernie (@People4Bernie) April 15, 2019

Sanders closed his Fox appearance with call-and-response with the town hall audience on a broad array of issues, including infrastructure, wages, and taxes on the ultra-wealthy:

Watch the full town hall:

Part 1

Part 2

First Julian Assange, Then Us

In a recent episode of “On Contact,” Chris Hedges spoke with historian and Truthdig contributor Vijay Prashad about the arrest of Julian Assange and its possible ramifications. Read a transcript of their conversation below or watch the interview at the bottom of the post.

Chris Hedges:  Welcome to “On Contact.” Today we discuss the arrest of Julian Assange with the historian Vijay Prashad.

Vijay Prashad:  You know if Chelsea Manning hadn’t decided to download that material, if Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks organization hadn’t decided to put that material out there, you and I who know these things to be true because we’ve seen them, would never have been able to talk about these things in such an open way.  And yet that’s not the conversation. The conversation became about Assange’s personality, about what he’d done in Sweden and so on.

CH:  The arrest of Julian Assange eviscerates all pretense of the rule of law and the rights of a free press. The illegalities embraced by the Ecuadorian, British and U.S. governments, in the seizure of Assange, are ominous. They presage a world where the internal workings, abuses, corruption, lies and crimes, especially war crimes, carried out by the corporate states and the global ruling elite, will be masked from the public. They presage a world where those with the courage and integrity to expose the misuse of power will be hunted down, tortured, subjected to sham trials and given lifetime prison terms in solitary confinement. They presage an Orwellian dystopia where news is replaced with propaganda, trivia and entertainment.  The arrest of Assange, I fear, marks the official beginning of the corporate totalitarianism that will define our lives.  Under what law did Ecuadorian President Lenín Moreno capriciously terminate Julian Assange’s rights of asylum as a political refugee? Under what law did Moreno authorize British police to enter the Ecuadorian Embassy—diplomatically sanctioned sovereign territory—to arrest a nationalized citizen of Ecuador? Under what law did Prime Minister Theresa May order the British police to grab Assange, who has never committed a crime? Under what law did Donald Trump demand the extradition of Assange, who is not a U.S. citizen and whose news organization is not based in the United States? Joining me to discuss the arrest and pending extradition of Assange is the historian Vijay Prashad. What have we just seen?

VP:  You know it’s a very interesting situation we’re in. You and I have been [in] and reported directly from very ugly situations, and over the course of our careers we’ve tried to tell stories about atrocities, we’ve tried to tell stories about what are tantamount to war crimes—editors don’t believe you. Editors don’t want to publish those stories, the ownership of newspapers and of course televisions don’t want to run those stories, because they say ‘You don’t have the smoking gun,’ ‘You don’t have the evidence.’ And what both Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange and the entire team at WikiLeaks did when they provided the raw materials of war crimes, was they allowed us to tell the stories that we had seen with our own eyes. And I think that rather than have the conversation about the war crimes, rather than for the Reuters organization for instance, to concentrate on the fact that an employee of Reuters was killed, you know, in cold blood by the United States—

CH: Two—two of them—

VP:  Two of them, one of them on contract, yes exactly. Two of them were killed by the United States military in cold blood. There was no reason. And the people in those helicopters in the video that was released as “Collateral Murder” were almost relishing the murder of ordinary people. If Chelsea Manning hadn’t decided to download that material, if Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks organization hadn’t decided to put that material out there, you and I—who know these things to be true because we’ve seen them—would never have been able to talk about these things in such an open way. And yet that’s not the conversation. The conversation became about Assange’s personality, about what he had done in Sweden and so on.  We know very well, Chris, that the arrest, the violation of Ecuadorian sovereignty on display in London, we know that that has nothing to do with what Julian Assange is purported to have done in Sweden. This is entirely to put the genie of American war crimes back inside the bottle.

CH:  And yet the press has—and I read every article on Assange, including the editorial and Michelle Goldberg’s horrible column—has just bought into this narrative without seeing that this is an assault on the ability of a press to shine a light into the inner workings of power and in particular, empire. That they, they are going after Assange. They’ve found a kind of legal trick. They’ll charge [Assange with] attempting to assist Manning to change a password, which even they admit he wasn’t able to do. But that’s not why they’re lynching him. They’re lynching him because he embarrassed them.  He exposed their crimes. It was a bipartisan effort because later we got the Podesta emails that showed the mendacity of the Clinton campaign on many levels: her $650,000 to speak in front of Goldman Sachs, a sum so large that it can only be considered a bribe; the millions of dollars that Saudi Arabia and Qatar—the chief supporters of the Islamic State—gave to the Clinton Foundation; the fact that the Clinton campaign worked to ensure Trump was the nominee; the kinds of statements she would make to the financial elites about how they were the best people to run the economy, which contradicted everything she was saying in the campaign; how she got the debate questions leaked to her in advance. And you [anyone] can argue, I suppose, that the public doesn’t have a right to know this or to know about the crimes of empire, but I don’t know how you can then call yourself a journalist.

VP:  Well, let’s be frank. We know what has happened to the journalist profession. I prefer to call many of my colleagues stenographers of the state, people [who] take press releases from the government or they accept what an official says. You just need to read the story, what is the sourcing of the story? An official said, another official said, a third official said, a fourth official said. Have you tried to verify the information? What is your moral standard?  The moral standard of what appears in corporate media is largely the morality of the state and of the national security system—they take that as ipso facto the truth. That’s a problem for me. I understand the profession, the tribe of journalists to be people who are constantly asking questions, not accepting a press release as the finished project. But what we see is so many times people rewrite the press release. They rewrite the statement made by the president, some national security official, and they put that out as the news. I want to say something very important.  Julian Assange was already in the Ecuadorian Embassy when the Podesta emails were leaked.

CH: Right.

VP:  What they are really going after him for was the leaks that came through Chelsea Manning.  Because what Chelsea Manning—who is in fact an international hero and should not be right now in prison—what Chelsea Manning showed us was, of course as I said, the “Collateral Murder” video, but much more than that; she deeply embarrassed the United States government for the way its diplomatic corps was operating during, for instance, the Arab Spring where they were colluding with Mubarak in Egypt to try to maintain his power, despite the fact that there were huge numbers of people not only in Tahrir Square but across Egypt. It also showed you—and this is very important—for a keen reader of the State Department cables, it showed you how the ambassadors were no longer actually running policy. So, you saw the ambassadors in Yemen, the ambassadors in Egypt, write letters back to Washington, D.C., saying that the Defense Department officials are coming here, national security officials [are coming here] and they are just sidelining us. And what’s interesting is the ambassador in Egypt is a woman and she says in one of the cables essentially “I’m becoming like a secretary; I’m taking notes in these meetings.  These are MY meetings.” That’s not only embarrassing; for an American citizen that should be very chilling. Diplomacy, as we see from these cables, is no longer being run in a political way by the State Department. Diplomacy is being run by the Defense Department and even more dangerously, by the anonymous national security state. That’s something that the U.S. government doesn’t want out there in the public. It’s OK for you and me to make those allegations, but to have the evidence for that is, I think, very significant.

CH:  That’s an important point. You have ambassadors who admit that they don’t know what the CIA station chief is up to or doing, who they’re contacting and what they’re orchestrating. They’re not even informed.

VP:  They’re not even informed, which is a question in a liberal democracy about who is in charge of the military? Who is in charge of the shadows? Right after 9/11, Vice President Dick Cheney famously said, “Well now it’s time to work in the shadows.” Who’s in charge of the shadows? Vice President Cheney? In a liberal democracy you assume that the political branch, which includes the State Department, is leading some of these matters and is the one you hold accountable. After all, Chris, you can’t hold the shadows accountable. We don’t know what’s happening in the shadows. If you’re going to permit the shadows to operate—people to operate in the shadows—then the only agency that’s accountable to the citizenry is the State Department.  I don’t mean to sound naive here. I don’t mean to sound like “Oh my god, how silly of him,” because what happens is, there’s a kind of patina of cynicism that enters the public. The public says, “Of course it’s going to be like that.” That “of course” is the road to authoritarianism. You have to hold your values very close to you, not just close to your chest but you’ve got to hold those values out there in public because once you start taking a cynical attitude to the institutions and ideology of your society, you’re going to end up giving license for authoritarianism.

CH:  We’ve just watched with the seizure of Assange, the violation of several laws, of international law, the right to political asylum, the violation of sovereignty under the Ecuadorian institution. You can’t—on Ecuadorian soil which is what the embassy is considered—you can’t send foreign police in. The whole imprisonment of Assange, who has never committed a crime or even—certainly within Britain—been charged for a crime. This whole bail thing was resolved.  The Swedish charges were dropped. This is a kind of microcosm of how these global elites and this imperial power creates the kind of facade of law, but behind the scenes eviscerate the law. It’s how we in the United States have a right to privacy with no privacy. It’s how we have due process with no due process. It’s how our rights are supposedly protected and the executive authorizes—under Obama—assassinate Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son. Both U.S. citizens. It’s how you have the mirage of free elections that are corporate funded, corporate controlled and reported on by a corporate media. I look at what’s happened to Assange as a window into the breakdown of the rule of law.

VP: Let’s be frank here. There was a case in Sweden. The statute of limitations runs to August 2020. The Swedish government can run the charges against him. But this arrest inside the Ecuadorian Embassy by, in a sense, an invading British police force, has nothing to do with the statute of limitations in Sweden. OK, Julian, there is a case against you in Sweden, go and face the charges. That’s a perfectly acceptable thing to talk about. I don’t think one should be evasive about it. On the other hand, it’s not about Sweden. This is about the United States. We should be clear about that. Sweden is being used as an alibi to bring him to the United States and face a Guantanamo situation in terms of legality. There is something very off-putting happening not only in the British government, not only with the United States, but with Ecuador. Right after Julian Assange is evicted, essentially, by the Ecuadorian government, in Quito, Ecuador, a young open-source advocate, privacy advocate, Swedish national by the name of Ola Bini, was picked up by Ecuadorian authorities. They began to leak information to the press saying that he’s a friend of Julian Assange. They began to say that he’s working with the previous government to overthrow this government—all ridiculous statements!  But coming at an interesting moment, when the government of Lenín Moreno, inside Ecuador, is facing enormous pressure because of leaked documents call the “INA Papers” which show flagrant evidence of corruption.

CH:  There are pictures of him eating lobster in his hotel room and his wife talking about trips to Switzerland. We’ll come back to that.  When we come back, we’ll continue our conversation about the arrest of Julian Assange with the historian Vijay Prashad.

Break

CH:  Welcome back to “On Contact.” We continue our conversation about the arrest of Julian Assange with the historian Vijay Prashad. You were talking about the Ecuadorian government before the break.

VP:  Generally, in the media, outside places like Ecuador, when something happens in the arrest of Julian Assange immediate focus goes to Donald Trump. What is Trump interest? Or the focus goes to Theresa May. What’s her interest? But there is an Ecuadorian story here which is very important. We have a government in Ecuador that is desperate to get a loan from the International Monetary Fund, which has approached the fund, which is trying to mend relations with the United States. I’m not casting aspersions on the government of Ecuador. These are things that are in the public record. They are seeking the loan. They want to improve relations with the United State government. We know in the world of diplomacy, when you talk to ambassadors and so on, that there are quid pro quos. It’s very clear that the quid pro quo was they’re going to say, “off with Assange” and then all things are good with Ecuador. And inside Ecuador they started this very bizarre campaign to say that the INA Papers, which were leaked recently, which showed deep corruption in the Lenín Moreno government and him personally. … These are things people don’t like to have in the public record, about how they live and so on. Nonetheless, this is out there now. They want to suggest that this is a sort of malignant plot by somebody. They’ve said, two Russian hackers and a Swede who has seen Julian Assange 12 times and who travels with former government officials, Ricardo Patiño, a close associate of Rafael Correa and that they are …

CH: We should say Rafael Correa, the former president who gave Julian Assange political asylum.

VP:  Right, and then worked closely to get him his citizenship—

CH:  And is now living in exile.

VP:  And is now himself living in exile in Europe, exactly. So, they concocted this quite delicious story. The media loves a delicious story. My god, Chris, two Russian hackers! The moment you’ve got a headline “Two Russian Hackers” it’s all done.

CH:  Well, you know, they shut down the electric grid in Vermont …

VP:  This Russian hacker business is going to become something that governments are going to use routinely. It doesn’t matter what the veracity.  So, this is their story. They’re trying to deflect attention from a very damaging set of revelations by saying that Julian Assange, plus a Russian hacker, plus a Swedish man who is a world-renowned software designer, intellectual of the internet, they’re all been maligning us. Therefore, we need to basically get rid of them and what they’re saying about us is not true. Innocent people are essentially being put on a sacrificial block in order to clean up the reputation of [these] people. I didn’t make up those stories. I didn’t “photoshop” those pictures. Those are real pictures. Why don’t you address the real story? In the same way the United States government has refused to address the story of war crimes. This is [also] happening in Ecuador.

I want to say something very specific about the United States government and war crimes. The International Criminal Court has been looking very seriously at the question of U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan, Iraq and so on. The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Fatou Bensouda, normally comes and addresses the U.N. Security Council. She gives a report on what the ICC has been doing, the criminal court, what’s in the docket, what are they looking at and so on. But to enter the U.N. in New York she must land in John F. Kennedy International Airport, which is sovereign U.S. territory. Well last week they were informed that the visa that permits her to land in the United States so that she can come to, essentially, U.N. territory, that visa is not guaranteed. What is going on here? You don’t actually want to talk about the real issues, actual textual and visual evidence of war criminal activity in one case, the United States and in the Ecuadorian case you don’t want to talk about actual evidence of corruption, personal corruption plus institutional. You don’t want to talk about that, so you start demonizing people.

CH:  Well, in a functioning judicial system, the people who committed the war crimes that Chelsea Manning exposed, would be put on trial. But of course, Chelsea Manning is in a jail cell because she is refusing to go before the grand jury that is investigating Assange, without her lawyer, and testify. She’s been under tremendous pressure, she spent seven years in a military prison, to implicate Assange in the theft of the documents. She has said repeatedly that it’s untrue and under pressure, especially under solitary confinement, she tried to commit suicide twice in these dark sites. If Assange is extradited, he won’t be flying back on a British Airways flight. He’ll have a hood over himself and be shackled. He will enter the underworld that is so well known to many Muslims around the globe.

I want to talk about the concerted effort to smear Assange. There was a leaked document that was prepared by the Cyber Counterintelligence Assessment Branch [of the U.S. Defense Department] on March 8, 2008. It called on the U.S. to build a campaign to eradicate “the feeling of trust of WikiLeaks and their center of gravity” and to destroy Assange’s reputation. The press became the echo chamber for this.

VP:  You’ve spent a lot of time at the New York Times. If you and I were sitting there in that beautiful office in New York City, a gorgeous office, and we were somehow in an editorial board meeting, I would imagine that you and I would insist that today’s editorial—that is the day after Julian Assange has been picked up from the Ecuadorian Embassy—today’s editorial must lead with that quotation. We must show, as a media house, that there has been an attempt—a conspiracy even—an attempt to create distrust in an organization that has revealed this important—which we also reported on!

CH: Right. And they destroyed [WikiLeaks] financially by blocking its Paypal accounts and everything else. WikiLeaks and Assange, at a certain moment, were heroes, even within the mainstream press. We must not forget The New York Times and Washington Post, Der Spiegel, Le Monde—they all published this material.

VP:  That’s very important! They published this material. At the time they understood the value of the material, even though they hedged and they this and that, nonetheless they published the material. They have amnesia about their own sense of trust of that organization. That’s should be something we remind them of. You utilized the material when it was convenient to you. When the United States government said smear their reputation, destroy them you joined the bandwagon.

CH:  Coming out of the New York Times culture, what Assange did was shame them into telling the truth. This is what the alternative media traditionally does to the commercial media. They realized that for WikiLeaks to put this material out and for them to ignore it, would essentially destroy their credibility, although they’ve done a pretty good job of destroying their own credibility as a newspaper organization. I want to close by talking about—and this is from Julian Assange’s book, “Cypherpunks”—where he talks about what he calls “The layers of indirection and obfuscation about what is happening.” He said: “These layers give the deniability to censorship” and he says:

“You can think about censorship as a pyramid. This pyramid only has its tip sticking out of the sand and that is by intention. The tip is public libel suits, murders of journalists, cameras being snatched by the military and so on, publicly declared censorship. But that is the smallest component. Under the tip, the next layer is all those people who don’t want to be at the tip, who engage in self-censorship, to not end up there.”

CH: I covered the Middle East. That is almost every reporter who covers, in particular, the Palestinians. Then:

“The next layer is all the forms of economic inducement or patronage, inducement that are given to people to write about one thing or another. The next layer down is raw economy, what it is economic to write about even if you don’t include the economic factors from higher up on the pyramid. The next layer is the prejudice of readers, who only have a certain amount of education so therefore on one hand they’re easy to manipulate with false information and on the other hand, you can’t tell them something sophisticated that is true. The last layer is distribution; for example some people just don’t have access to information in a particular language. So that is the censorship pyramid—what The Guardian is doing with its Cablegate redactions is the second layer.” 

CH: He’s right. You have all these forces, many of which that are subterranean, that essentially block [the truth]. I used to say that the unofficial motto of The New York Times is do not significantly alienate those on whom we depend on access and money. As a reporter you might be able to alienate them once in a while, but if you consistently alienate them you become a management problem, as I did.

VP:  You become a management problem. You also are portrayed as unhinged. This is a very important. Why are there so many conspiracy theories in the 20th and 21st century? Secrecy breeds that. The secrecy state, or the culture of secrecy of governments, sends people into the sewers looking for explanations. You want people to have a rational, reasonable understanding—tell us what’s happening. When you actually look at what’s happening, it doesn’t look very reasonable and rational. It looks very ugly.

CH:  Thanks, Vijay. That was the historian Vijay Prashad.

We must now all resist. We must in every way possible put pressure on the British government to halt the judicial lynching of Julian Assange. If Assange is extradited and tried, it will create a legal precedent that will terminate the ability of the press, which Trump repeatedly has called “the enemy of the people,” to hold power accountable. The crimes of war and finance, the persecution of dissidents, minorities and immigrants, the pillaging by corporations of the nation and the ecosystem, and the ruthless impoverishment of working men and women to swell the bank accounts of the rich, and consolidate the global oligarch’s total grip on power, will not only expand, but will no longer be part of public debate. First Assange.  Then us.

The transcript was prepared by Naila Kauser.

Weld Says He Is Seeking GOP Nomination for President in 2020

BOSTON—Former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld says he is seeking the Republican nomination against President Donald Trump in 2020.

Weld said Monday in announcing his candidacy that “it is time to return to the principles of Lincoln — equality, dignity and opportunity for all.” He said, in his words, “There is no greater cause on earth than to preserve what truly makes America great. I am ready to lead that fight.”

Weld was the 2016 Libertarian vice presidential nominee. He served two terms as Massachusetts governor in the 1990s.

Weld’s move makes Trump the first incumbent president since George H.W. Bush in 1992 to face a notable primary challenge.

The Republican National Committee in January issued a nonbinding resolution to declare the party’s undivided support for Trump.

Pulitzers Awarded to Newsrooms for Coverage of 3 Mass Shootings

NEW YORK—The South Florida Sun Sentinel and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette won Pulitzer Prizes on Monday and were recognized along with the Capital Gazette of Maryland for their coverage of the horrifying mass shootings in 2018 at a high school, a synagogue and a newsroom itself.

The Associated Press won in the international reporting category for documenting the humanitarian horrors of Yemen’s civil war, while The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal were honored for delving into President Donald Trump’s finances and breaking open the hush-money scandals involving two women who said they had affairs with him.

The Florida paper received the Pulitzer in public service for its coverage of the massacre of 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland and for detailing the shortcomings in school discipline and security that contributed to the carnage.

The Post-Gazette was honored in the breaking news category for its reporting on the synagogue rampage that left 11 people dead. The man awaiting trial in the attack railed against Jews before, during and after the massacre, authorities said.

After the Pulitzer announcement, the newsroom in Pittsburgh observed a moment of silence for the victims. At the Sun Sentinel, too, the staff took in the award in a sober spirit.

“We’re mindful of what it is that we won for,” Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson said. “There are still families grieving, so it’s not joy, it’s almost … I don’t know how to describe it. We’re emotional, as well.”

So, too, at the Capital Gazette, which was given a special citation for its coverage and courage in the face of a massacre in its own newsroom. The Pulitzer board also gave the paper an extraordinary $100,000 grant to further its journalism.

“Clearly, there were a lot of mixed feelings,” editor Rick Hutzell said. “No one wants to win an award for something that kills five of your friends.”

The Annapolis-based newspaper published on schedule, with some help from The Baltimore Sun, the day after five staffers were shot and killed in one of the deadliest attacks on journalists in U.S. history. The man charged had a longstanding grudge against the paper.

The Pulitzers, U.S. journalism’s highest honor, reflected a year when journalism also came under attack in other ways.

Reuters won an international reporting award for work that cost two of its staffers their liberty: coverage of a brutal crackdown on Rohingya Muslims by security forces in Myanmar.

Reporters Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo are serving a seven-year sentence after being convicted of violating the country’s Official Secrets Act. Their supporters say the two were arrested in retaliation for their reporting.

Reuters also won the breaking news photography award for images of Central American migrants heading to the U.S.

The AP’s international reporting prize went to a team of journalists who documented atrocities and suffering in Yemen, illuminating the human toll of its 4-year-old civil war.

As a result of the work by reporter Maggie Michael, photographer Nariman El-Mofty and video journalist Maad al-Zikry, at least 80 prisoners were released from secret detention sites, and the United Nations rushed food and medicine to areas where the AP revealed that people were starving while corrupt officials diverted international food aid.

“This is a story that everybody was not really paying good attention, and we’re very happy to be able to draw some attention to it,” Michael said.

Images of the famine in Yemen also brought a feature photography award for The Washington Post. The Post’s book critic, Carlos Lozada, won the criticism prize for what the judges called “trenchant and searching” work.

In the U.S., journalists have been contending with attacks on the media’s integrity from the president on down. Trump has branded coverage of his administration “fake news” and assailed the media as the “enemy of the people.”

Monday’s wins by the Times and The Wall Street Journal and freelance cartoonist Darrin Bell may further anger the president.

The Times won the explanatory reporting Pulitzer for laying out how a president who has portrayed himself as a largely self-made man has, in fact, received over $400 million in family money and helped his family avoid hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes. Trump has called the Times expose a false “hit piece.”

The Journal took the national reporting award for its investigations of payments orchestrated by the president’s former lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, to buy the silence of porn star Stormy Daniels and a Playboy centerfold. Trump has denied having affairs with them.

Bell, the editorial cartooning winner, called out “lies, hypocrisy and fraud in the political turmoil surrounding the Trump administration,” the Pulitzer judges said.

The Los Angeles Times took the investigative reporting prize for stories that revealed hundreds of sexual abuse accusations against a recently retired University of Southern California gynecologist, who has denied the allegations. The university recently agreed to a $215 million settlement with the alleged victims.

The local reporting prize went to The Advocate of Louisiana for work that led to a state constitutional amendment abolishing Louisiana’s unusual practice of allowing non-unanimous jury verdicts in felony trials.

ProPublica won the feature reporting award for coverage of Salvadoran immigrants affected by a federal crackdown on the MS-13 gang.

Tony Messenger of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch received the commentary award for his series of columns about poor people being thrown back in jail in Missouri because they couldn’t afford to pay the costs of a previous stint behind bars.

The New York Times’ Brent Staples received the editorial writing award. The judges said his writing about the nation’s racial history showed “extraordinary moral clarity.”

The journalism prizes, first awarded in 1917, were established by newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer. Winners of the public service award receive a gold medal. The other awards carry a prize of $15,000 each.

___

Contributing were Associated Press writers Deepti Hajela in New York; Kelli Kennedy in Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Janet McConnaughey in New Orleans; and Michael Kunzelman in Annapolis, Maryland.

Bernie Sanders Removes the Gloves

On Saturday, the Center for American Progress (CAP), one of the country’s leading liberal think tanks, received a letter from the current favorite for the Democratic nomination in 2020. “Dear members of the Board,” it began. “I write to express my deep concern and disappointment with the role that the Center for American Progress and its affiliated Action Fund arm are playing in the critical mission to defeat Donald Trump.”

The letter’s author was none other than Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who blistered CAP’s affiliate site ThinkProgress for a recent op-ed that disparaged his physical appearance, as well as a separate video that suggested that his calls for economic redistribution were fundamentally hypocritical—this because his book royalties have made him a millionaire. Sanders also took aim at the organization’s president, Neera Tanden, for preaching solidarity while “belittling progressive ideas,” openly speculating that “corporate money … is inordinately and inappropriately influencing the role [CAP] is playing in the progressive movement.”

Sanders’ letter was likely years in the writing. As the New York Times’ Kenneth P. Vogel and Sydney Ember observe:

Mr. Sanders’s criticism of the Center for American Progress, delivered on Saturday in a letter obtained by The New York Times, reflects a simmering ideological battle within the Democratic Party and threatens to reopen wounds from the 2016 primary between him and Hillary Clinton’s allies. The letter airs criticisms shared among his supporters: that the think tank, which has close ties to Mrs. Clinton and the Democratic Party establishment, is beholden to corporate donors and has worked to quash a leftward shift in the party led partly by Mr. Sanders.

CAP has been an inextricable part of Democratic politics since Hillary Clinton’s future campaign chairman, John Podesta, founded the organization in 2003. As the Times’ Vogel and Ember reveal, the think tank helped draft policy proposals that Barack Obama would ultimately use for his 2008 campaign, and later served as a feeder of sorts for his administration. The think tank was expected to serve the same function for Clinton had she prevailed in the 2016 election; Podesta and Tanden were among her top choices for White House chief of staff.

Last year, CAP partnered with the American Enterprise Institute on a project titled “Defending Democracy and Underwriting the Transatlantic Project,” ostensibly to study how we can preserve free and open societies amid a rising tide of authoritarianism. In the process, the think tank donated $200,000 to an organization whose most prominent members include neoconservative Bill Kristol and racial eugenicist Charles Murray, leading some in progressive circles to wonder “why is the Center for American Progress betraying the left?”

In a 2013 investigation for The Nation, Ken Silverstein revealed that CAP has accepted contributions from the likes of Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Coca-Cola, Citigroup, BlueCross BlueShield and weapons manufacturer Northrop Grumman, not to mention hundreds of thousands of dollars from the United Arab Emirates—among the world’s most brutal and oppressive regimes. Tanden, who regularly rails against Russian President Vladimir Putin as a “proto-fascist,” has herself come under criticism online for cozying up to such strongmen as Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and India’s Narendra Modi.

ThinkProgress claims to enjoy editorial independence from CAP, and Editor-in-Chief Jodi Enda asserted as much in a statement to the Times, insisting that the group and its action funds “had nothing to do with the article or video about Senator Sanders or articles related to any other political leader.” She also added that the site “will not take sides in the Democratic primary.” Tanden, for her part, has called the matter “unfortunate,” claiming that “we share the goal of unity.” Still, it’s not difficult to imagine the think tank has a vested interest in preventing Sanders from becoming the party’s nominee. The self-proclaimed democratic socialist is unlikely to rely on CAP as Obama and Clinton have before him, and so the threat he poses to Tanden and her ilk is existential: their grip on power, within the party and the country, is at stake.

Last December, as rumors swirled about Beto O’Rourke’s possible run for president, Tanden accused several prominent Sanders backers of coordinating attacks against the moderate Texas official. Responding to an op-ed from the Washington Post’s Elizabeth Bruenig, she tweeted: “Feels a bit orchestrated and clearly they are worried.” But as Sanders cements his frontrunner status, her words increasingly look like projection. And after watching Democrats lose the White House in grotesque fashion to a glorified game show host, he refuses to let bad-faith criticism from purportedly liberal media go unanswered.

Sanders’ supporters have not forgotten 2016’s contentious primary, with ample evidence that Democratic elites helped seal his defeat. While his campaign says he will honor his pledge not to go negative in ads for 2020, the Vermont senator nonetheless appears determined to prevent history from repeating itself.

Update: Tanden has since issued the following statement:

The orientation of CAP is to positively engage with all political leaders about the country’s future.

ThinkProgress is editorially independent of CAP and CAP Action, which is what has made it valuable as a news outlet. Similarly, we at CAP can form our own opinions of their work. We believe the content of the ThinkProgress video critiquing Sen. Sanders is overly harsh and does not reflect our approach to a constructive debate of the issues.

 

Nancy Pelosi Doesn’t Understand the Direction of Her Own Party

Voters in New York and Michigan knew Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib were democratic socialists when they sent them to Congress in the 2018 midterm elections. So did the people who helped Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who calls himself a democratic socialist, become the “fundraising front-runner” of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, as CNN reported Sunday, having raised $18.2 million in the first 41 days of his campaign.

According to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., however, Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, Sanders and other members of the progressive wing of Congress represent “like, five people,” she said in a “60 Minutes” interview Sunday. When asked by CNN for a response, Ocasio-Cortez’s office declined to comment.

Pelosi also told interviewer Lesley Stahl that “I do reject socialism as an economic system. If people have that view, that’s their view. That is not the view of the Democratic Party.”

Democratic presidential candidates like former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas and Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass, and Kamala Harris, D-Calif, and Cory Booker, D-N.J., may not call themselves socialists or have a membership in the Democratic Socialists of America—the organization that helped send Tlaib and Ocasio-Cortez to Congress, and others to state legislatures across the country—but many of them have supported policies associated with it, including Medicare-for-all. The elected officials among them have even co-sponsored legislation hoping to make the health care proposal a reality.

Public support for Medicare-for-all among Democratic voters is also growing. According to the latest Kaiser Family Foundation tracking poll, approximately 56% of respondents either “strongly favor” or “somewhat favor” the idea.

A similar pattern has occurred with the Green New Deal. All of the Democratic senators running for president have backed some version of the environmental legislation. Democratic public opinion is also moving in its favor.

According to a December 2018 poll from the Yale Program on Climate Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, 92% of surveyed Democrats support the idea of a Green New Deal. Even 64% of surveyed Republicans in the same poll supported it. The poll-takers didn’t mention to respondents which members of Congress supported the legislation.

Even the concept of socialism is starting to be viewed more positively, according to a 2018 Gallup poll. “For the first time in Gallup’s measurement over the past decade,” writer Frank Newport explained, “Democrats have a more positive image of socialism than they do of capitalism.” The poll found 57% of respondents viewed socialism positively, compared to 47% who felt the same toward capitalism.

Pelosi, at least on Sunday night, remained unconvinced that more left-leaning policies would be helpful to the Democratic Party, or that the progressive representatives should keep the stances with which they were elected. She told Stahl, “By and large, whatever orientation they came to Congress with, they know we have to hold the center. We have to go down the mainstream.”